And the winner is ... text. Huh.

There are a gazillion ways we can send messages to each other these days: email, chat, your favorite social medium, send a postcard, make a phone call, walk over and say hi, etc., etc..  Some of these were the stuff of science fiction when I was a kid.  In particular, I think it's finally time to say that videophones are commonplace.  Most smartphones can handle it, and the bandwidth is there in many places, though certainly not everywhere.  Even so, millions of people have the ability to make a video call should they so choose.  Probably more like hundreds of millions.  And many do.

And yet ... if you have a video-capable smartphone and you want to send someone a quick message, or you're a celebrity and you want to let your fans know when your next appearance is, or you're a bank and you want to send your client a security code for logging in, or you're a wireless carrier and you want to send your customer a balance update, or even in some cases a spammer who wants to tell someone they may already have won a fabulous prize, or for any other number of reasons, what medium do you choose?  You send a text message.

This is really not all that new an idea.  In the 1800s, for example, people would send telegrams and cables, or -- in densely populated areas, at least -- dash off short notes for messengers to carry.  The diction is even strikingly similar to the modern equivalent, and it's even more striking given that there is massively more bandwidth available these days.  Clearly the problem is not that you have to crowd everything into a 160-character SMS message.  There are any number of ways around that.  Nor are you paying by the word, as in the old days.   With all the ways that one could send a message, right up to a high-bandwidth video connection, people are choosing to text.

What parameters might determine this?

Text has about the lowest bandwidth of anything that's in regular use for communication.  If you've ever heard anyone try ... to ... repeat ... what ... they ... were ... texting ... as ... they ... typed ... it ... in, you were probably gritting your teeth.  Even if you can text as fast as you can talk, with liberal use of abbreviations like OMG and U, it's still much more mental effort than just, y'know, talking.

As a side-effect of the low bandwidth, text is notoriously bad for conveying inflection and other nuances.  Emoticons only help so much.  Was that smiley sarcastic?  Is that frowny because of what they're telling me, or because they're telling it to me?  I texted them five minutes ago and they haven't replied.  Are they busy or do they hate me?  And so forth.

Text is so-so for latency and reliability.  Messages get dropped form time to time, or hung up in the ether for minutes or hours with no indication of whether they've been delivered or not.  Even under ideal conditions, you have to wait for the other party to type in their entire message before you get to see any of it.

Where text wins, I think, is setup time, which is as minimal as can be.



There are two main types of protocol: Packet-switched and circuit switched.  In a packet-switched protocol, the sender constructs self-contained packets and sends them to the receiver.  Since each packet is self-contained, individual packets may get lost or misdirected, and there is no guarantee that just because one arrived, any other will as well.  The prototypical packet-switched system is the mail, and to this day internet protocol documents speak of "envelopes" and "addresses".

In a circuit-switched protocol, the two parties first establish a connection (as we tend to call it these days), and then communicate over it.  Once the connection is established, messages flow over it in either direction (though in some cases they must take turns), until the connection is closed, either deliberately by the participants or by some sort of external disruption.  In general, you have some indication that this has happened, and if you do have a connection established, it's quick and easy to say "did you hear that?" or whatever if there's any doubt.

The prototypical circuit-switched protocol is the telephone.  When you place a call, you are establishing a connection.  Originally, the operator would use a patch board to set up an actual electrical circuit.  Thence the name.

Connections take a while to set up.  When you call someone, you put in their number, their phone rings, they stop what they're doing and answer it, and generally say "hello" or something to make sure you know the connection is established.  And then you talk.  A video call works much the same way, and for the same reason.  It's establishing a connection.

There are currently two widely-established packet-switched media: email and text.  I say "media" here because I'm talking about how things look to the people using them, as opposed to network protocols like TCP, UDP, ICMP and so forth, and I'm leaving aside services like Snapchat, which go beyond text, because it's early days yet.

Of email and text, text is much lighter weight.  Email more or less requires a subject line, and if a simple email evolves into a conversation, each piece of the conversation general contains everything previous. It's possible to have a rapid-fire email conversation, but it's a bit awkward. It's also considerably more likely that the recipient of your email isn't going to look at it for an indefinite amount of time.  For better or worse, if you're carrying your phone, you're likely to know immediately if someone has texted you.

Put all that together, and text wins, easily, on setup time.  If you already have a window open for your recipient (a sort of mini-connection, but without the overhead of setting up both ends), you just type.  And that's it.  Even if you don't, it's generally easy to pick a recipient from your contacts.  And then you just type.  And that's it.

Because the setup is so easy, a text can easily turn into a conversation.  If the conversation gets involved, you can always text "call me" or whatever and get the benefits of a real, higher-bandwidth connection but, crucially, this is opt-in.  You only pay that price if it turns out to be worth it.


It's now been almost twenty years since Kurt Dahl predicted that in the year 2020 -- then still comfortably far in the future -- there would be no need for kids to learn to read (See the Field Notes take on it here).   Instead, "text" became a verb, one used most by the very kids who would have seemed not to need it.  As always, it's easy, and pointless, to criticize in hindsight, though it might have been a clue that the prediction itself was conveyed via text.  Certainly there are many reasons why text should still be around, and texting is probably not a particularly big one.  Nonetheless, it's interesting that a medium that would seem to have so little going for it would win out, and that this could be due not so much to the virtues of text itself, as to the economics of communication protocols.

NEW TECHNOLOGY LOOKS ODDLY FAMILIAR STOP

My phone is not particularly well suited to texting, but for various reasons I've found myself doing more of it lately.  Even beyond the basic problem of typing on a chiclet keyboard with fingers that did some of their first typing on an Underwood manual, there are a couple of challenges.

For one, I'm used to writing complete sentences, so I find myself compulsively and pointlessly going back and fixing spelling mistakes, checking punctuation and so forth.  Mind, I don't have anything against the usual abbreviations and casual spellings. I doubt it's a sign that the language has gone to pot or that Kids These Days don't learn anything.  More likely it's a sign that full and careful spelling is just not worth the effort if you can get your message across more quickly without it.

The upshot is that I text much, much more slowly than I write.  I'd guess at least four times as slowly and very likely closer to eight or ten [re-reading in 2015, I note that I'm able to text much faster now, with a smartphone and keyboard app, and the character limit is much less visible.  I think my texting is somewhat less terse now, but the overall point of texting technology influencing texting style still stands, I think -- D.H.].  An order of magnitude in quantity generally means a change in quality and this is no different.  Working at such a slow speed, I find every word counts, as typing another is just too much bother.

Side note: Once I was at a conference where computer graphics legend Jim Blinn presented his first ray-traced picture.  Ray-tracing is a technique that carefully follows rays of light through every pixel of the picture, as opposed to the classic "polygon pushing" technique, which Blinn helped pioneer and which is still in wide use today because of its speed.  Polygon pushing determines which surfaces are visible and draws them (more or less directly), saving a bunch of time.  Blinn claimed that one of the nice aspects of ray-tracing was that since it was so slow, around eight hours per frame in that case, as I recall, you had plenty of time to think about what was going to be in the image.

Just so, slowing down to text gives much more time to think about a short message.  I'm sure the situation is different for experienced texters, but even then another factor comes into play: SMS's draconianly (and more or less artificially) short message length.  If you're tweeting, it doesn't matter if you're sitting at your desk typing full steam ahead, or picking out words while squinting at a cell phone, or rattling away with thumbs of lightning.  140 bytes is 140 bytes.

Way back in the early days of electronic communication networks, people sending messages faced a similar problem.  I'm not aware of any particular length restriction on telegraph messages, but for decades telegraph messages had to be transmitted, by hand, in morse code.  As a result every word was expensive -- and punctuation was conveyed in words, notably STOP for a period.  To cope with this, customers developed a concise "telegraphic" style in order to make every word count.

Technology doesn't just enable.  It also constrains, and the effects of such constraint can be just as interesting.

On codices and conventions

As I was reading Robert Darnton's The Case for Books, one word in particular jumped out at me, one which I hardly remembering hearing since high school: codex. Random house defines it by way of another delightfully arcane term:

a quire of manuscript pages held together by stitching

A quire, in turn is a set of folded leaves of paper or parchment (particularly, a set of 24 or 25). In other words, the distinctive feature of the codex is that it has pages, as opposed to a scroll or tablet. Here's a broad view from Darnton of what this meant:

The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex — that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll — became crucial to the spread of Christianity. It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader's aids.

I would parse this as one major technical shift — from a single, serial scroll to random-access pages — and several refinements in convention — inter-word spacing, paragraphs, chapters, tables of contents, indexes, etc. This seems very much analogous to the case of conventions on the web. In both cases the technical shifts (script-enabled browsers in the web case) are important, but they are relatively rare. Small shifts in convention (tabs, rollover highlighting, etc.) are more common, and just as important in the aggregate.

You saw the website. Now read the book!

Someone sent me a link the other day to a definition on Urban Dictionary. While enjoying that, I noticed a link for their latest book. It's not surprising that a major site should have an associated book or two. What's surprising is that it's not surprising.

I've argued before that text as a medium is not going to die out any time soon and that the web is a major factor in that. But it's a bit more puzzling why print doesn't die out. Books from web sites are a particular curiosity, and one for an online reference even more so. Think about it: The online version is searchable, hyperlinked and up to date. The print version is none of the three.

A dictionary is meant to be searched, is generally more fun and useful to browse by chasing cross-references, and had best be up to date (it'll often be new words you'll want to know the meaning of, at least when it comes to slang). Why bother with print? I can see why a publisher would bother: they know how to get paid for print. But why bother to buy a book?

Copy protection isn't an issue for a free online dictionary. It's got to be the form factor. It's still hard to take the online version with you wherever you go. Sure, you can carry a laptop with you, and there are hot spots and cell modems, but a book is generally smaller and more reliable. And it's not that hard to search, particularly if the entries are alphabetized.

Kindle was supposed to change all that, but as far as I can tell the infrastructure and selection aren't quite there yet to make Kindle take off.

Undead technology

I did a double-take just now when I followed a link to a PDF file and noticed the Kinkos/FedEx logo in my PDF viewer. When did that happen? [Imagine a quick Google search here] Looks like the deal was announced back in June.

OK, so if I'm reading something perfectly well online, I have the option of sending it off to my local copy shop, having it printed out and then venturing out to go pick it up. Or, I suppose, I could have it FedExed to my doorstep.

Something tells me I'm not in the right market niche for this.

I could, however, imagine FooCorp emailing a bunch of, say, nice glossy marketing collateral from the Oceania headquarters to the Eurasia headquarters, where it would then be printed at the local shop, collated and bound and delivered to the appropriate desks. Clearly Adobe and Kinkos/FedEx think that people will want this, and who am I to say them nay?

At the risk of sounding like an, um, broken record, it seems that certain technologies have not yet figured out that they're supposed to be dead. Text isn't dead. It's now a verb. Print appears to be doing just fine, as well.

Why is there still print?

The Newsweek article on Kindle quotes Jeff Bezos as saying "Books are the last bastion of analog." I take his point, but it seems an odd statement. Text, after all, is arguably the first real digital medium. What he means by "digital", of course, is "available to computers". Unlike music and video, which are now routinely released in computer-readable form, books are still released in a form you can't just download. Bezos aims to change this with the Kindle.

The interesting question is, why does print resist digitization so well? I've suggested that publishers like it because it provides copy protection, but why does it? The answer has to be economic, not technical. Technically, it's trivial to digitize a book. Just scan it in. Don't bother to try to convert the image back to text. If all that people want to do with the result is read it, the image should work fine.

There's an interesting subplot here. Optical character recognition (OCR) seems to do fairly well these days on well-printed books, judging by Google books and Amazon's own "Search inside the book" feature. On the other hand, the fully general problem of reading anything a person can make out still appears to be hard, which is why sites use distorted text CAPTCHAs to try to stop bots. This seems like the equivalent of anX-prize for freelance OCR hackers, and indeed the inevitable arms race appears to be well under way. Finally, bringing us full circle, one source of these CAPTCHAs is printed text that failed to scan correctly.

In any case, the difficulty doesn't seem to be digitizing text in a readable form. The problem is, what do you do with it once you've got it? It's technically trivial to scan a book, but it still takes some time and effort to flip through all the pages, at least without expensive specialized equipment. So if I've done this, I'd like to see some compensation -- assuming I don't mind violating copyright laws.

Can I put it on the web and sell it? Well, um, I've just brought it into digital form, thereby making it hugely easier to copy. In other words, I've just put myself in the position of the publisher whose print-based copy protection I've just broken. If copy-protection is out, there's always advertising. Except that's maybe not such a good idea given that I've just broken the law.

This same argument would seem to act as a counterbalance to all sorts of unauthorized copying, but obviously it doesn't apply as effectively to audio and video. This is probably because copying CDs and DVDs is much, much easier than scanning books, and also because books are simply a different medium. I'd expect that PhDs have already been earned on just such matters.

Kindle and print

While looking for something else, I ran across the November 26 issue of Newsweek. The cover story was on Amazon's new Kindle e-book. Conveniently enough, the article is available online.

Overall I found the article pretty evenhanded, balancing the "print is inherently inefficient" side with the "books are inherently special" side. As usual, I think both sides have valid points. A few thoughts:

• Yes, print is inherently inefficient. That doesn't mean it will die anytime soon. People still sent hand-delivered messages long after the telephone became widespread. Steam trains ran long after the diesel came along. Western Union only recently shut down its telegraph service.
• On the other hand, it's hard to imagine print not giving way to bits over time and eventually reaching niche status. My completely unfounded guess is that it will end up more like blacksmithing than buggy whips.
• Amazon is right to recognize that it's not enough just to have an electronic device that more or less looks like a book. The Kindle is not just a device but a service. Along with searchability and the potential for hyperlinks, Amazon hopes the killer app will be the "buy and read it right now" feature. Push a button (and pay Amazon a fee generally less than you'd pay for print) and the Kindle will download whatever book you like. Whether this is enough to pull people in remains to be seen, but it at least seems plausible.
• The Kindle relies on copy protection, presumably using some Trusted Computing-like facility. I've argued that it's not unreasonable to expect a special-purpose device to give up programmability in an attempt to lock down copy protection. Again, it will be interesting to see how well this works.
• Conversely, print has a nice, well-understood copy protection model. Copying a book means physically copying pages. In theory this is quite breakable. In practice it works well (so far). Publishers naturally like this. It would be interesting to try to quantify how much this convenience to publishers is extending the lifetime of the book, as opposed to the "nice to curl up with and read" aspect.

Text and technological change

In the previous post on literary texts and hypertexts, I had meant to make a fairly mundane point, but got sidetracked in the fascinating details of the particular texts I was using as examples. At least, I found it fascinating.

The mundane point was this: The web has given rise to new textual forms, things like wikis, blogs and for that matter ordinary HTML web sites. Some aspects of these are new, but the general notion of a text as a multi-layered, interlinked structure, possibly with multiple authors and a less-than-clear history, is not.

This is a general point, not limited to literary criticism. For example, the question of what constitutes a derived work, important in software copyrights, musical sampling and elsewhere, has a long history. This history happens to include Ulysses -- one of the charges leveled against the 1984 corrected text of Ulysses was that the publishers had pushed to include as many corrections as possible in hopes of obtaining a new copyright.

We sometimes like to think that a new technology changes everything, that the old rules cannot possibly apply because the game itself is so different. Technology does change things, but our social tools for coping with the change remain largely the same. The flip side of this is that the problems a new technology appears to raise are often older than one might think.

The end of text?

With help from friends, I finally tracked down the piece I said I was looking for. It was written in 1994 and, ironically enough, there only seems to be one copy of it on the web, or at least the Google-searchable part.

The thesis is that in 2020 a nine-year-old would have had no reason to learn how to read. The written word, after all, is just a technology for conveying ideas, and by 2020 video and other rich media will do the same job better.

The written word is a means to an end and not an end in itself. We use it to communicate with large groups and to preserve ideas, but we prefer the spoken word. In 2020world, with the ability to create, store and send audio and video as easily as written words, why would we need to read and write?

Look inside your own head. Do you store information as written words? Do you dream in written words? No, you don't. Visual images and spoken languages are our natural form of information. Writing is nothing more than a technology. It can be replaced by something better.

Clearly this is missing something. At the very least, the timing is off. If they're going to stop teaching reading in the schools in the next ten years, I'd expect to see serious signs right now that writing was on the way out. Perhaps a blog post written about an newspaper article is the wrong place to look, but I see no such signs. It's a separate question whether schools would change their curricula that quickly even in the face of irrefutable evidence.

So let's suppose that the date should have been 2050, or 2100. Technology predictions are notorious for assuming things will change faster than they really do. Is text really doomed to be obsolete?

Text is a means of recording words. True, we don't think in text. But neither do we think in words, at least not to the extent we sometimes say we do. Words, whether written or spoken, represent ideas. They do so digitally. Text is a sequence of discrete, arbitrary symbols. To a first approximation, so are spoken words. Otherwise text wouldn't work. Hand-copying of written text is among the oldest forms of digital data processing.

Text is compact. This post takes a small fraction of the space that an audible version would. Even in an age of abundant bandwidth, a difference of orders of magnitude will matter. Since text represents words digitally (as opposed to representing the waveforms of one particular utterance of those words), it is easily searched. At the very least, a usably searchable database of video and audio would have to use something much like text behind the scenes.

Text is faster for people because vision has more bandwidth than hearing and well-formatted text is tuned to take advantage of that. I can skim this post much faster than I could read it aloud. I can skim backwards easily. I can skip sentences and paragraphs easily and precisely. If I want to make a minor change to the second sentence of the third paragraph, I can easily locate that and I can easily change just the words I want to change. Text is thus more easily editable.

Since text can easily (from a human viewpoint) be accessed both randomly and sequentially, it is easier to organize. This is probably one reason speakers so often work from notes. Another is that the mere act of committing something to text encourages the writer to pay attention to its structure.

There are probably a few other relevant features of text that I've left out. There are also some that may not be particularly useful but whose implications are probably still worth understanding. For example, writing text is generally much slower than reading it, while speaking and hearing happen at the same speed.

In any case, my bet is that text will be around for quite some time, particularly on the net. If this still seems unlikely, consider how often text appears on TV. Video and text are by no means mutually exclusive.